After a week of snow melts into disgusting slush, you could say that things are very much the opposite of beautiful in New York this Friday evening. But you don't have to look outside to get your fix of good lookin' things. We've got plenty to sate your appetite right here, from the worlds of art, design, architecture, and more.

Every two years, the world takes part in a figurative dance that's been decades in the making. First, it's the iconic passing of the torch. Then, an epic, national-pride-filled opening ceremony. And, finally, it's the moment we've all been waiting for. The holiest and most timeless of Olympic traditions: It's time to mock the mascots.

I don't know if it's the The Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony or the slow twisting motion of the quadcopter's descent, but I really love this first scene from Viktor Mirzoyan's aerial video over a beige Washington D.C.

The Great Plains of the United States. Some of the most breathtaking landscapes on Earth happen over this vast land. Often, their beauty is on their skies, as these territories are the stage of some of the the most incredible thunderstorms and supercells in the world.

Back in 1963, a Czech sci-fi film called Ikarie XB-1 told an epic story—set 200 years in the future—of an eponymous spaceship that went in search of a mysterious, unknown planet. This month, the fateful spacecraft has been recreated on the top floor of NYC'sNew Museum.

In any other painting, a naked butt tattooed with a musical score would be the first thing you'd notice. But it's just another detail in Hieronymus Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights—which explains why it's taken someone 500 years to try to play it.

The only color in the landscape for miles, Salvation Mountain looms like a mirage on the horizon. The three-story, three-decade work of artist Leonard Knight, who died yesterday at the age of 82, is a piece of brightly painted, hand-sculpted California desert, like an impossibly scaled cathedral made from Play-Doh.

In the years after World War II, most of Europe was devastated, both physically and financially. From this drab reality, one country began producing bright, technicolor textiles, including a print which bolstered its economy, created national pride, and ended up becoming one of the most beloved and recognizable patterns in the world.

If you're somehow not sick of winter yet, then you're sick of hearing other people complain about it. And there's at least another month of this crap in our future. So sit back, relax, and let Jesus Diaz take you on a calming ride through the world's best beach houses.

A cemetery in Sweden. A floating school in Nigeria. A cast-iron facade in the UK. The wildly divergent list of nominees for the Design Museum's annual awards make you wonder: How the hell do you pick a single building to represent such a broad profession?

Human bones are amazing—seriously, they're incredibly cool—but up until recently, it's been hard to engineer a synthetic material that replicates the super-strong structure of the real thing. Now, scientists in Germany are using a 3D printer to do just that—and it could mean a breakthrough for how we build everything from architecture to spacecraft.

If you could build your own High Line, what would it look like? That's the question the QueensWay Project, an effort to turn an abandoned stretch of railway in Queens into an elevated pedestrian and bike path, recently asked designers to answer. Some of the winners announced today are truly wild.